


the second law of motion

by seek_its_opposite



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Post-Season 9 (X-Files), Pre-The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008), The Unremarkable House (X-Files)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 14:38:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16266257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seek_its_opposite/pseuds/seek_its_opposite
Summary: What she’d like to tell herself is that she wouldn’t have believed it, 10 years ago, if you told her this would be how she and Mulder would fall off the edge of the world: watching paint dry.





	the second law of motion

Summer was long and the grass is dry in the yard, pressed down into the dirt like a kind of crop circle, like the house itself dropped from the heavens. When they toured the place, she almost expected to find ruby slippers under the front porch.  _Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore_. **  
**

They were in Kansas six weeks ago, actually, knees pressed up against each other on a motel room bed as they weighed the risks. The clouds didn’t look like anything in particular, but when Mulder said they looked like deeds to a house she said  _Yes, yes they do_ , and the decision was made.

This is how they click their heels and wish for home: with trigger fingers hovering over empty pockets.

“Behind you,” Mulder announces from the kitchen threshold, careful not to startle.

“Did you bring the drop cloths down?” she asks, shaking water off the last of the rollers. A pre-fall breeze rattles the screen in the window.

“No,” he murmurs, obviously distracted. He did not come downstairs to talk about drop cloths. He leans over her shoulder to turn off the sink and rumbles into her ear, “Let me get that for you.”

Then, without warning, Mulder puts his hand on her hip and spins her toward him. 

“If you insist,” she gasps, quieter than she means to. Lately the air between them has a way of stripping flirtation down to sincerity. She wipes her hands on his paint-splattered shirt.

Mulder smiles, grabs both of her palms in his long fingers. And kneels.

“Mulder, what—?”

“Dana Scully,” he begins, solemn as a sacrament. “Will you watch paint dry with me?”

This is the man she married under a made-up name in a one-stoplight town, in sickness and in health and under threat of state-sanctioned execution. She loves him.

She means it when she says, “I thought you’d never ask.”

He exhales low, like it’s an actual vow, which she supposes it is. She tries to pull him to his feet. Because she knows the laws of physics, she isn’t surprised when she winds up balanced on his leg instead with her tongue in his mouth. Because she played with magnets as a child, she expects her fingers to find his hair.

Finally, and with some reluctance, she whispers into his neck, “It’s drying without us.” He lets her lead him upstairs.

***

What she’d like to tell herself is that she wouldn’t have believed it, 10 years ago, if you told her this would be how she and Mulder would fall off the edge of the world: watching paint dry. The truth is she would have believed it in a heartbeat. She just wouldn’t have guessed she’d be happy about it.

They sit shoulder to shoulder, slate grey paint on his cheek. Sunlight streaks through the window and slices across the room, their room, their new room. The space is cool and bright at once.

“I like it,” she says.

“Good,” he nods. Like that’s all he wanted

“What do you think?” She turns and looks up at him, a few strands of her hair catching in his stubble.

“I think,” he begins, studying the wall, “it’s perfect for sleeping in.”

“That’d be a first.”

“All of this is a first, Scully.”

The walls are the color of their office in the shadows, just before dusk. The basement lights are off, the door is closing, and she’s looking back, turning the key.

“Not all of it,” she says. She leans her head on his shoulder.

“Hey.” He folds his fingers into hers, bringing their clasped hands to his knee. “We’re going to be okay.”

It’s so simple, the way he comforts her: not what he says, but the fact that he senses her need to hear it. It’s the way he knows her.

“We just lost so much time,” she sighs.

“ _No_ , no. I know lost time.” Mulder’s voice is deep and performative. “Lost time was a friend of mine. Dr. Scully, this was no lost time.”

She laughs, turns her head so her nose brushes his sleeve. He runs his finger under her chin, lifting it toward him until they lock eyes.

“It just wasn’t always the best time,” he says.

She whispers again without meaning to. “That’s done now.”

“Yeah.”

He runs a paint-streaked section of her hair through his fingers. He says, warmly, “You have a little something right here.”

She knows. He dripped on her earlier, painting a high and hard-to-reach corner, and told her not to dare wash it out.  _It’s dignified_ , he said.

She taps his cheek. “Let he who is without paint cast the first stone.”

Once, in the office, as she held back the urge to laugh Mulder’s theory out the door (something about a little boy and his invisible friend), she scribbled  _YOU ARE HERE_  on a Post-it Note and slapped it on the UFO on his poster.  _This is where your mind is, Mulder_. She hadn’t been able to disprove him, in the end. She thought about it years later when he was abducted, when that poster was ash—he was always right, her partner.

They are too often gone. They are too often missing each other by seconds. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the more you know about a particle’s position the less you know about its momentum, and vice versa. They have always understood their momentum better than their position. They are everywhere and nowhere but always running. They have a son but couldn’t stay still with him long enough for a last name to stick.

But they have a son. And they have a house, and he probably does too. This is a kind of quantum entanglement. It isn’t a small thing to think: that where they are going feels like where they are. Mulder will become someone who chops wood in the winter. She’ll get dirt under her nails, plant tomatoes in the spring. They’ll buy too many blankets and hide under them.  _You are coming ashore, you are here_. 

“We should do this every day,” Mulder says.

She rests her head on his shoulder again. “We can do that.”


End file.
